By MR Josse
TAMPA, FL: With political gridlock and partial government shutdown in Washington showing no signs of going away, let us ruminate over some inter-connected developments unfolding elsewhere.
Wall Street Journal (WSJ)’s Daniel Henninger, for one, mulling over the fact that governments of the world’s two oldest democracies are at a virtual standstill – the United States’, over the contentious Wall issue and the United Kingdom’s in the aftermath of the overwhelming rejection of Premier Teresa May’s Brexit plan to separate Britain from the EU – wonders if ‘gridlock is the new normal.’
NEW NORMAL?
Perpetual political gridlock, he fears, could, for better or worse, be the future of politics where people have the political means to stop anything they don’t want, but can’t enable anything they need. If that prognosis is prescient, the overall impact on people’s lives could be messy, if not painful.
One reason that is happening, Henninger explains, is that politicians and external factions foment dramatic projects like Brexit without possessing any idea how to execute them. They provide British voters a powerful emotional high but no game plan; indeed, more than two years later, they still don’t have one.
In Henninger’s elegant phraseology: “Another reason is the rise of the power of inconsolables. Political factions are eternal. The new element is that their social-media bullhorn make them seem larger and more intimidating than they are. Twitter really is the mouse that roars. Unable to figure it out, the politicians have turned themselves into twittering mice on the floors of Parliament and Congress.”
Behind the ungainly political stasis in America and Britain today is, of course, the fact that immigration and identity have not only become enormously cogent issues but are the two engines that have driven the phenomenon of political populism that has manifested, for example, so powerfully in Germany, Italy, Austria and Hungary today.
Donald Trump, in retrospect, seems thus to have been merely in the vanguard of what may be termed as the international populist/identity movement.
Though there can be little doubt that, much earlier, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequent dramatic expansion of the European Union set the stage for latter-day European reaction against unfettered immigration, one must wonder – as a Nepali – whether she can continue to exist as an independent state with an eternally open border with the second most populous country in the world!
$ 20.20 DONATION
Returning to Trump’s America, one notes that, as per media reportage, the president’s team is split on the shutdown strategy: White House aides want compromise on the wall; political advisers see a 2020 benefit.
Meanwhile, I found it not a little amusing that the Trump re-election campaign is planning to launch a website called Build the Border Wall that asks supporters to donate $ 20.20. In exchange, the campaign will mail “red faux bricks” to the Congressional offices of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer.
Also edifying was a WSJ opinion piece by renowned political guru, Karl Rove, who provided this useful backgrounder: “Mr. Trump settled for far less wall funding in 2017 and 2018 – $ 1.6 billion each year – and long ago abandoned the notion of a wall spanning 1,954 miles of the U.S.- Mexico border. For their part, Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Chuck Schumer supported President Obama’s construction of border walls and fences and they voted twice for wall money since Mr. Trump took office. But today both sides are dug in. Intransigence is their watchword.”
It is revealing that droves of Democrats are beginning to jam the 2020 electoral highway. According to a USA Today report: “About 30 Democratic office holders and activists have signaled they are considering the contest and there may be more waiting to be noticed. Their number is poised to outpace the 17 credible candidates who competed at some point for the 1976 Democratic convention which chose Jimmy Carter.”
As most recall, at the 2016 Republican convention, a record of 17 credible candidates contested for nomination which, surprisingly, Trump snagged.
This bring me to WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan’s latest piece wherein she declares that. today, it is not “a thought, a stand or a statement, but a mood” that defines a presidential candidate. In her opinion, they do so “because they want to seem unpretentious, relatable: I’m just like you.” She however believes: “We would like someone better than us.”
In making her case, she refers to Democratic hopeful Beto O’Rourke of Texas who live streamed a dental visit as part of his campaign!
AFGHAN HOME-TRUTHS
I wish now to share some thoughts/observations on Afghanistan, including those culled from Chayanika Saxena’s “A crumbling ‘pax Americana’ in Afghanistan”, just published in Eurasia Review, which refers to U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilizad’s January 9 visit to India which did not cut much ice.
As per Saxena, a dismissal of India’s role in the Afghan peace process has come not only from Pakistan but also from NATO Assistant Secretary-General, Alejandro Alvargonzalez, who affirmed that Pakistan’s role was of “utmost importance to the peace process” while India has a “prominent place in Afghanistan” – but so do “hundreds of others.”
The article furthermore refers to President Trump’s televised comment on January 20, mocking India’s development assistance to Afghanistan as “equivalent of what the U.S. spends in five hours.”
However one may interpret the above comments, I did find attention-worthy these terse insights from Ahmed Rashid’s “Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia”, which I have just begun reading.
“The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan (1989) was followed by another withdrawal – that of the United States from the entire region under George H.W. Bush. Having won the cold war, Washington had no further interest in Afghanistan or the region. This left a critical power vacuum for which the United States would pay an enormously high price a decade later.”
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